Selasa, 23 Oktober 2012

KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

Although Cambodia had achieved independence by late 1953, its
military situation remained unsettled. Noncommunist factions of the
Khmer Issarak had joined the government, but pro-communistViet Minh and United Issarak Front
activities increased at the very time French Union forces were
stretched thin elsewhere. In April 1954, several Viet Minh battalions
crossed the border into Cambodia. Royalist forces engaged them but could
not force their complete withdrawal. In part, the communists were
attempting to strengthen their bargaining position at the Geneva Conference that had been scheduled to begin in late April.

The Geneva Conference was attended by representatives of Cambodia, North Vietnam, the Associated State of Vietnam (the predecessor of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam), Laos, the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and the United States. One goal of the conference was to restore a lasting peace in Indochina.
The discussions on Indochina began on May 8, 1954. The North Vietnamese
attempted to get representation for the resistance government that had
been established in the south, but failed. On July 21, 1954, the
conference reached an agreement calling for a cessation of hostilities
in Indochina. With respect to Cambodia, the agreement stipulated that
all Viet Minh military forces be withdrawn within ninety days and that
Cambodian resistance forces be demobilized within thirty days. In a
separate agreement signed by the Cambodian representative, the French
and the Viet Minh agreed to withdraw all forces from Cambodian soil by
October 1954.In exchange for the withdrawal of Viet Minh forces, the communist
representatives in Geneva wanted full neutrality for Cambodia and for
Laos that would prevent the basing of United States military forces in these countries. On the eve of the conference's conclusion, however, the Cambodian representative, Sam Sary,
insisted that, if Cambodia were to be genuinely independent, it must
not be prohibited from seeking whatever military assistance it desired
(Cambodia had earlier appealed to Washington
for military aid). The conference accepted this point over North
Vietnam's strenuous objections. In the final agreement, Cambodia
accepted a watered-down neutrality, vowing not to join any military
alliance "not in conformity with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations" or to allow the basing of foreign military forces on its territory "as long as its security is not threatened."The conference agreement established the International Control Commission
(officially called the International Commission for Supervision and
Control) in all the Indochinese countries. Made up of representatives
from Canada, Poland and India, it supervised the cease-fire, the
withdrawal of foreign troops, the release of prisoners of war,
and overall compliance with the terms of the agreement. The French and
most of the Viet Minh forces were withdrawn on schedule in October 1954.

Domestic developments

The Geneva agreement also stipulated that general elections
should be held in Cambodia during 1955 and that the International
Control Commission should monitor them to ensure fairness. Sihanouk was
more determined than ever to defeat the Democrats (who, on the basis of
their past record, were expected to win the election). The king
attempted unsuccessfully to have the constitution amended. On March 2,
1955, he announced his abdication in favor of his father, Norodom Suramarit.
Assuming the title of samdech (prince), Sihanouk explained that this
action was necessary in order to give him a free hand to engage in
politics.To challenge the Democrats, Prince Sihanouk established his own
political machine, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular Socialist
Community), commonly referred to as the Sangkum, which, despite its name, contained significant right-wing
elements that were virulently anticommunist. The Sangkum's emergence in
early 1955 unified most right-wing groups under the prince's auspices.
In the September election, Sihanouk's new party decisively defeated the
Democrats, the Khmer Independence Party of Son Ngoc Thanh, and the leftistPracheachon Party, winning 83% of the vote and all of the seats in the National Assembly.The results of the 1955 election
have been attributed to fraud and intimidation. Voters were intimidated
by a voting system involving colored pieces of paper that had to be put
into a box in full view of Sihanouk's political figures, soldiers and
local police. In many cases, voting results were simply falsified as in
the case where a district that had been a Viet Minh stronghold for years
did not return a single vote for the far left. Writer Philip Short
points to a 1957 statement by Sihanouk admitting that thirty six
electoral districts had voted Pracheachon or Democrat majority whereas
the official results said that they had won none.Khmer nationalism, loyalty to the monarch, struggle against injustice and corruption, and protection of the Buddhist religion were major themes in Sangkum ideology. The party adopted a particularly conservative interpretation of Buddhism, common in the Theravada countries of Southeast Asia, that the social and economic inequalities among people were legitimate because of the workings of karma.
For the poorer classes, virtuous and obedient conduct opened up the
possibility of being born into a higher station in a future life.In August 1957, Sihanouk summoned the leaders of the Democrat party
to what he called a "debate" at the Royal Palace. They were subjected to
five hours of public humiliation. After the event was over, the
participants were dragged from their cars and beaten with rifle butts by
Sihanouk's police and army.Around the same time, the Pracheachon party put up five candidates
for election. Sihanouk travelled in person to each district and the
government mounted a full campaign against the party. The national radio
service accused the party of being Vietnamese puppets. Posters showing
supposed atrocities were hung in the districts. Eventually four
candidates were intimidated into dropping out of the election. The only
one who stayed in was credited by government officials with 396 votes
out of an electorate of 30,000 in an area where Pracheachon was known to
have deep support.As the 1960s began, organized political opposition to Sihanouk and
the Sangkum virtually had been largely driven underground. According to
Vickery, the Democratic Party disbanded in 1957 after its leaders—who
had been beaten by soldiers—requested the privilege of joining the Sangkum.Despite its defense of the status quo, especially the interests of
rural elites, the Sangkum was not an exclusively right-wing
organization. Sihanouk invited a number of leftists into his party and
government to provide a balance to the right-wing. Among these were
future leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Hu Nim and Hou Yuon served in several ministries between 1958 and 1963, and Khieu Samphan served briefly as secretary of state for commerce in 1963.But the independent parties of the left were generally targeted for
destruction. On October 9, 1959 the editor of the Pracheachon Weekly
Paper, Nop Bophann
was shot to death outside his office by state security police. In 1960,
some two thousand people were detained for political reasons in a
holding camp outside the capital. State Security cases were handled by a
military tribunal from which there was no appeal. The tribunal handed
down over thirty death decrees in its first six months of operation and
it was widely known that the verdicts were the personal decision of
Sihanouk himself.In 1960, the editor of the paper l'Observateur
was beaten in the street, stripped naked and photographed by members of
the security police a few hundred yards from the Central Police
Station. The editor reported the attack to the police. When the National
Assembly summoned the minister responsible to explain the incident, he
said it was the job of the police to protect the opponents of the
government. The minister then proceeded to name members of the National
Assembly who he considered to be in the same category of opponents. One
of the named deputies, Uch Ven, tabled a censure
motion that had been drawn up against the minister. Sihanouk issued a
statement afterward attacking the members of the National Assembly for
their hostile attitude toward the police. Within days, l'Observateur
and two other papers were closed by the government, fifty people were
detained indefinitely for questioning and the political director of
Sihanouk's own newspaper was fired for an editorial objecting to
heavy-handed political intimidation.In July 1962, one of the leading leftists in the country, Tou Samouth
was grabbed by the security police while seeking medicine for his child
in a street market. He was held in secret and tortured for several
days. He was eventually simply murdered with his body dumped into a
wasteland in the Stung Meancheay district of Phnom Penh.In March 1963, Sihanouk published a list of thirty four leftists.
After denouncing them as cowards, hypocrites, saboteurs, subversive
agents and traitors, he demanded that they form a government for the
country. Shortly after, they were brought into the presence of Sihanouk
and each signed a statement saying that he was only man capable of
leading the country. After the incident, police officers were posted
outside the residences and places of employment of each of the named
men. They were essentially under permanent police observation.The results of 1962 and 1963 were to drive the underground leftist
movement out of the cities and into the countryside. Even underground
politics or proxy actions through above-ground parties against the
government had effectively ceased to be possible.Sihanouk's attitude toward the left was often cynical. He realized
that his own political position was dependent on carefully balancing off
the left in Cambodia against the right. If one side ever defeated the
other, the next step of either party would be to end Sihanouk's role in
ruling the country. He often declared that if he had not been a prince,
he would have become a revolutionary. Sihanouk's chronic suspicion of
United States intentions in the region, his perception of revolutionary
China as Cambodia's most valuable ally, his respect for such prominent
and capable leftists as Hou, Hu, and Khieu, and his vague notions of
"royal socialism" all impelled him to experiment with socialist
policies. It should also be recognized that each move toward socialism
gave Sihanouk and his inner circle the able to reward each other with
lucrative political "spoils" and patronage. In 1963 the prince announced the nationalization
of banking, foreign trade, and insurance as a means of reducing foreign
control of the economy. In 1964 a state trading company, the National
Export-Import Corporation, was established to handle foreign commerce.
The declared purposes of nationalization were to give Khmer nationals,
rather than Chinese or Vietnamese, a greater role in the nation's trade,
to eliminate middlemen and to conserve foreign exchange through the
limiting of unnecessary luxury imports. As a result of this policy,
foreign investment quickly disappeared, and a nepotistic "crony
socialism" emerged somewhat similar to the "crony capitalism" that
evolved in the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos. Lucrative state monopolies were parceled out to Sihanouk's most loyal retainers, who "milked" them for cash.Sihanouk was headed steadily for a collision with the right. To
counter charges of one-man rule, the prince declared that he would
relinquish control of candidate selection and would permit more than one
Sangkum candidate to run for each seat in the September 1966 National
Assembly election. The returns showed a surprising upsurge in the
conservative vote at the expense of more moderate and left-wing
elements, although Hou, Hu, and Khieu were reelected by their
constituencies. General Lon Nol became prime minister.Out of concern that the right wing might cause an irreparable split
within the Sangkum and might challenge his domination of the political
system, Sihanouk set up a "counter government" (like the British "shadow
cabinet") packed with his most loyal personal followers and with
leading leftists, hoping that it would exert a restraining influence on
Lon Nol. Leftists accused the general of being groomed by Western
intelligence agencies to lead a bloody anticommunist coup d'état similar to that of General Suharto in Indonesia. Injured in an automobile accident, Lon Nol resigned in April 1967. Sihanouk replaced him with a trusted centrist, Son Sann. This was the twenty-third successive Sangkum cabinet and government to have been appointed by Sihanouk since the party was formed in 1955.

Nonaligned foreign policy

Sihanouk's nonaligned foreign policy, which emerged in the months
following the Geneva Conference, cannot be understood without reference
to Cambodia's past history of foreign subjugation and its very uncertain
prospects for survival as the war
between North Vietnam and South Vietnam intensified. Soon after the
1954 Geneva Conference, Sihanouk expressed some interest in integrating
Cambodia into the framework of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO),
which included Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam within the "treaty
area", although none of these states was a signatory. But meetings in
late 1954 with India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Burma's Premier U Nu
made him receptive to the appeal of nonalignment. Moreover, the prince
was somewhat uneasy about a United States-dominated alliance that
included one old enemy, Thailand, and encompassed another, South Vietnam, each of which offered sanctuary to anti-Sihanouk dissidents.At the Bandung Conference in April 1955, Sihanouk held private meetings with Premier Zhou Enlai of China and Foreign Minister Phạm Văn Đồng
of North Vietnam. Both assured him that their countries would respect
Cambodia's independence and territorial integrity. His experience with
the French, first as a client, then as the self-proclaimed leader of the
"royal crusade for independence", apparently led him to conclude that
the United States, like France, would eventually be forced to leave
Southeast Asia. From this perspective, the Western presence in Indochina
was only a temporary interruption of the dynamics of the
region—continued Vietnamese (and perhaps even Thai) expansion at
Cambodia's expense. Accommodation with North Vietnam and friendly ties
with China during the late 1950s and the 1960s were tactics designed to
counteract these dynamics. China accepted Sihanouk's overtures and
became a valuable counterweight to growing Vietnamese and Thai pressure
on Cambodia.Cambodia's relations with China were based on mutual interests.
Sihanouk hoped that China would restrain the Vietnamese and the Thai
from acting to Cambodia's detriment. The Chinese, in turn, viewed
Cambodia's nonalignment as vital in order to prevent the encirclement of
their country by the United States and its allies. When Premier Zhou
Enlai visited Phnom Penh
in 1956, he asked the country's Chinese minority, numbering about
300,000, to cooperate in Cambodia's development, to stay out of
politics, and to consider adopting Cambodian citizenship. This gesture
helped to resolve a sensitive issue—the loyalty of Cambodian
Chinese—that had troubled the relationship between Phnom Penh and Beijing.
In 1960 the two countries signed a Treaty of Friendship and
Nonaggression. After the Sino-Soviet rift Sihanouk's ardent friendship
with China contributed to generally cooler ties with Moscow.China was not the only large power to which Sihanouk looked for
patronage, however. Cambodia's quest for security and nation-building
assistance impelled the prince to search beyond Asia and to accept help
from all donors as long as there was no impingement upon his country's
sovereignty. With this end in mind, Sihanouk turned to the United States
in 1955 and negotiated a military aid agreement that secured funds and
equipment for the Royal Khmer Armed Forces (Forces Armées Royales
Khmères—FARK). A United States Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG)
was established in Phnom Penh to supervise the delivery and the use of
equipment that began to arrive from the United States. By the early
1960s, aid from Washington constituted 30% of Cambodia's defense budget
and 14% of total budget inflows (First Indochina War).Relations with the United States, however, proved to be stormy. United States officials both in Washington and in Phnom Penh
frequently underestimated the prince and considered him to be an
erratic figure with minimal understanding of the threat posed by Asian communism.
Sihanouk easily reciprocated this mistrust because several developments
aroused his suspicion of United States intentions toward his country.One of these developments was the growing United States influence within the Cambodian armed forces.
The processing of equipment deliveries and the training of Cambodian
personnel had forged close ties between United States military advisers
and their Cambodian counterparts. Military officers of both nations also
shared apprehensions about the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.
Sihanouk considered FARK to be Washington's most powerful constituency
in his country. The prince also feared that a number of high-ranking,
rightist FARK officers led by Lon Nol were becoming too powerful and
that, by association with these officers, United States influence in
Cambodia was becoming too deeply rooted.A second development included the repetition of overflights by United
States and South Vietnamese military aircraft within Cambodian airspace
and border incursions by South Vietnamese troops in hot pursuit of Viet Cong
insurgents who crossed into Cambodian territory when military pressure
upon them became too sustained. As the early 1960s wore on, this
increasingly sensitive issue contributed to the deterioration of
relations between Phnom Penh and Washington.A third development was Sihanouk's own belief that he had been
targeted by United States intelligence agencies for replacement by a
more pro-Western leader. Evidence to support this suspicion came to
light in 1959 when the government discovered a plot to overthrow
Sihanouk. The conspiracy, often known as the "Bangkok Plot", involved several Khmer leaders suspected of American connections. Among them were Sam Sary, a leader of right-wing Khmer Serei troops in South Vietnam; Son Ngoc Thanh, the early nationalist leader once exiled into Thailand; and Dap Chhuon, the military governor of Siem Reap Province. Another alleged plot involved Dap Chuon's establishment of a "free" state that would have included Siem Reap Province and Kampong Thum (Kampong Thom) Province and the southern areas of Laos that were controlled by the rightist Laotian prince, Boun Oum.These developments, magnified by Sihanouk's abiding suspicions,
eventually undermined Phnom Penh's relations with Washington. In
November 1963, the prince charged that the United States was continuing
to support the subversive activities of the Khmer Serei
in Thailand and in South Vietnam, and he announced the immediate
termination of Washington's aid program to Cambodia. Relations continued
to deteriorate, and the final break came in May 1965 amid increasing
indications of airspace violations by South Vietnamese and by United
States aircraft and of ground fighting between Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops and Viet Cong insurgents in the Cambodian border areas.In the meantime, Cambodia's relations with North Vietnam and with
South Vietnam, as well as the rupture with Washington, reflected
Sihanouk's efforts to adjust to geopolitical realities in Southeast Asia
and to keep his country out of the escalating war in neighboring South
Vietnam. In the early-to-mid-1960s, this effort required a tilt toward Hanoi because the government in Saigon tottered on the brink of anarchy. In the cities, the administration of Ngo Dinh Diem
and the military regimes that succeeded it had become increasingly
ineffectual and unstable, while in the countryside the government forces
were steadily losing ground to the Hanoi-backed insurgents.To observers in Phnom Penh, South Vietnam's short-term viability was
seriously in doubt, and this compelled a new tack in Cambodian foreign
policy. First, Cambodia severed diplomatic ties with Saigon in August
1963. The following March, Sihanouk announced plans to establish
diplomatic relations with North Vietnam and to negotiate a border
settlement directly with Hanoi. These plans were not implemented
quickly, however, because the North Vietnamese told the prince that any
problem concerning Cambodia's border with South Vietnam would have to be
negotiated directly with the National Front for the Liberation of South
Vietnam (NFLSVN). Cambodia opened border talks with the front in
mid-1966, and the latter recognized the inviolability of Cambodia's
borders a year later. North Vietnam quickly followed suit. Cambodia was
the first foreign government to recognize the NFLSVN's Provisional
Revolutionary Government after it was established in June 1969. Sihanouk
was the only foreign head of state to attend the funeral of Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam's deceased leader, in Hanoi three months later.In 1965, Sihanouk negotiated a deal with China and North Vietnam.
Whereas before Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces had temporarily
move into Cambodian territory, the deal allowed them to build permanent
military facilities on Cambodian soil. Cambodia also opened its ports to
shipments of military supplies from China and the Soviet Union to the
Vietnamese. In exchange for these concessions, large amounts of money
passed into the hands of the Cambodian elite. In particular, deals were
made where China would purchase rice at inflated prices from the
Cambodian government. While Sihanouk talked neutrality in public, he had
effectively pushed Cambodia directly into the Vietnam War.After making friends with North Vietnam and China, Sihanouk turned
politically to the right and unleashed a wave of repression throughout
the country. The repression drove most of the political left in the
country underground. While Sihanouk's deal with China and Vietnam in the
short term kept both countries from arming the Cambodian left, it did
not prevent the Cambodian left from launching an unsupported rebellion
on its own.In the late 1960s, while preserving relations with China and with
North Vietnam, Sihanouk sought to restore a measure of equilibrium by
improving Cambodia's ties with the West. This shift in course by the
prince represented another adjustment to prevailing conditions in Asia.
The Chinese had become almost impossible to deal with because of the
turmoil associated with the cultural revolution. The North Vietnamese
presence in Eastern Cambodia had grown so large that it was
destabilizing Cambodia politically and economically. Further, when the
Cambodian left went underground in the late 1960s, Sihanouk had to make
concessions to the right in the absence of any force that he could play
off against them. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were increasing
their use of sanctuaries in Cambodia, which also served as the southern
terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
their logistical resupply route originating in both North Vietnam and
Cambodia's own ports. Cambodian neutrality in the war no longer existed,
and China, preoccupied with its Cultural Revolution,
did not intercede with Hanoi. On Cambodia's eastern border, South
Vietnam, surprisingly, had not collapsed, even in the face of the
communist Tet Offensive in 1968, and President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's
government was bringing a measure of stability to the war-ravaged
country. As the government in Phnom Penh began to feel keenly the loss
of economic and military aid from the United States, which had totaled
about US$400 million between 1955 and 1963, it began to have second
thoughts about the rupture with Washington. The unavailability of
American equipment and spare parts was exacerbated by the poor quality
and the small numbers of Soviet, Chinese, and French substitutes.In late 1967 and in early 1968, Sihanouk signaled that he would raise
no objection to hot pursuit of communist forces by South Vietnamese or
by United States troops into Cambodian territory. Washington, in the
meantime, accepted the recommendation of the United States Military Assistance Command--Vietnam
(MACV) and, beginning in March 1969, ordered a series of airstrikes
(dubbed the Menu series) against Cambodian sanctuaries used by the North
Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Whether or not these bombing missions
were authorized aroused considerable controversy, and assertions by the Nixon administration that Sihanouk had "allowed" or even "encouraged" them were disputed by critics such as British journalist William Shawcross.
But in retrospect, Sihanouk allowing US bombing as a counter-weight to
his previous decision to allow the Vietnamese to establish base areas
seems consistent with his policy strategy in that US was the only force
he could use as a counter-weight to the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia.On a diplomatic level, however, the Menu airstrikes did not impede
bilateral relations from moving forward. In April 1969, Nixon sent a
note to the prince affirming that the United States recognized and
respected "the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of the
Kingdom of Cambodia with its present frontiers." Shortly thereafter, in
June 1969, full diplomatic relations were restored between Phnom Penh
and Washington.

The Cambodian Left: the early phases

The history of the communist movement in Cambodia can be divided into six phases: the emergence of the Indochinese Communist Party
(ICP), whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese, before World
War II; the ten-year struggle for independence from the French, when a
separate Cambodian communist party, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party
(KPRP), was established under Vietnamese auspices; the period following
the Second Party Congress of the KPRP in 1960, when Saloth Sar (Pol Pot
after 1976) and other future Khmer Rouge leaders gained control of its
apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the initiation of the Khmer
Rouge insurgency in 1967-68 to the fall of the Lon Nol government in
April 1975; the Democratic Kampuchea
regime, from April 1975 to January 1979; and the period following the
Third Party Congress of the KPRP in January 1979, when Hanoi effectively
assumed control over Cambodia's government and communist party.Much of the movement's history has been shrouded in mystery, largely
because successive purges, especially during the Democratic Kampuchea
period, have left so few survivors to recount their experiences. One
thing is evident, however, the tension between Khmer and Vietnamese was a
major theme in the movement's development. In the three decades between
the end of World War II and the Khmer Rouge victory, the appeal of
communism to Western educated intellectuals (and to a lesser extent its
more inchoate attraction for poor peasants) was tempered by the
apprehension that the much stronger Vietnamese movement was using
communism as an ideological rationale for dominating the Khmer. The
analogy between the Vietnamese communists and the Nguyễn Dynasty, which had legitimized its encroachments in the 19th century in terms of the "civilizing mission" of Confucianism,
was persuasive. Thus, the new brand of indigenous communism that
emerged after 1960 combined nationalist and revolutionary appeals and,
when it could afford to, exploited the virulent anti-Vietnamese
sentiments of the Khmers. Khmer Rouge literature in the 1970s frequently
referred to the Vietnamese as yuon (barbarian), a term dating from the Angkorian period.In 1930 Ho Chi Minh founded the Vietnamese Communist Party by unifying three smaller communist movements that had emerged in Tonkin, in Annam, and in Cochinchina
during the late 1920s. The name was changed almost immediately to the
ICP, ostensibly to include revolutionaries from Cambodia and Laos.
Almost without exception, however, all the earliest party members were
Vietnamese. By the end of World War II, a handful of Cambodians had
joined its ranks, but their influence on the Indochinese communist
movement and on developments within Cambodia was negligible.Viet Minh units occasionally made forays into Cambodian bases during
their war against the French, and, in conjunction with the leftist
government that ruled Thailand until 1947, the Viet Minh encouraged the
formation of armed, left-wing Khmer Issarak bands. On April 17, 1950
(twenty-five years to the day before the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom
Penh), the first nationwide congress of the Khmer Issarak groups
convened, and the United Issarak Front was established. Its leader was Son Ngoc Minh
(possibly a brother of the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh), and a third of
its leadership consisted of members of the ICP. According to the
historian David P. Chandler,
the leftist Issarak groups, aided by the Viet Minh, occupied a sixth of
Cambodia's territory by 1952; and, on the eve of the Geneva Conference,
they controlled as much as one half of the country.In 1951 the ICP was reorganized into three national units—the Vietnam Workers' Party, the Lao Itsala,
and the KPRP. According to a document issued after the reorganization,
the Vietnam Workers' Party would continue to "supervise" the smaller
Laotian and Cambodian movements. Most KPRP leaders and rank-and-file
seem to have been either Khmer Krom, or ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia. The party's appeal to indigenous Khmers appears to have been minimal.According to Democratic Kampuchea's version of party history, the
Viet Minh's failure to negotiate a political role for the KPRP at the
1954 Geneva Conference represented a betrayal of the Cambodian movement,
which still controlled large areas of the countryside and which
commanded at least 5,000 armed men. Following the conference, about
1,000 members of the KPRP, including Son Ngoc Minh, made a "Long March"
into North Vietnam, where they remained in exile. In late 1954, those
who stayed in Cambodia founded a legal political party, the Pracheachon
Party, which participated in the 1955 and the 1958 National Assembly
elections. In the September 1955 election, it won about 4% of the vote
but did not secure a seat in the legislature. Members of the Pracheachon
were subject to constant harassment and to arrests because the party
remained outside Sihanouk's Sangkum. Government attacks prevented it
from participating in the 1962 election and drove it underground.
Sihanouk habitually labeled local leftists the Khmer Rouge, a term that
later came to signify the party and the state headed by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and their associates.During the mid-1950s, KPRP factions, the "urban committee" (headed by Tou Samouth), and the "rural committee" (headed by Sieu Heng),
emerged. In very general terms, these groups espoused divergent
revolutionary lines. The prevalent "urban" line, endorsed by North
Vietnam, recognized that Sihanouk, by virtue of his success in winning
independence from the French, was a genuine national leader whose
neutralism and deep distrust of the United States made him a valuable
asset in Hanoi's struggle to "liberate" South Vietnam. Champions of this
line hoped that the prince could be persuaded to distance himself from
the right wing and to adopt leftist policies. The other line, supported
for the most part by rural cadres who were familiar with the harsh
realities of the countryside, advocated an immediate struggle to
overthrow the "feudalist"
Sihanouk. In 1959 Sieu Heng defected to the government and provided the
security forces with information that enabled them to destroy as much
as 90% of the party's rural apparatus. Although communist networks in
Phnom Penh and in other towns under Tou Samouth's jurisdiction fared
better, only a few hundred communists remained active in the country by
1960.

The Paris Student Group

During the 1950s, Khmer students in Paris organized their own
communist movement, which had little, if any, connection to the
hard-pressed party in their homeland. From their ranks came the men and
women who returned home and took command of the party apparatus during
the 1960s, led an effective insurgency against Sihanouk and Lon Nol from
1968 until 1975, and established the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.Pol Pot, who rose to the leadership of the communist movement in the 1960s, was born in 1928 (some sources say in 1925) in Kampong Thum Province,
north of Phnom Penh. He attended a technical high school in the capital
and then went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics (other
sources say he attended a school for printers and typesetters and also
studied civil engineering). Described by one source as a "determined,
rather plodding organizer", he failed to obtain a degree, but, according
to the Catholic priest, Fr. François Ponchaud, he acquired a taste for the classics of French literature as well as for the writings of Marx.Another member of the Paris student group was Ieng Sary. He was a
Chinese-Khmer born in 1930 in South Vietnam. He attended the elite Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh before beginning courses in commerce and politics at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (more widely known as Sciences Po)
in France. Khieu Samphan, considered "one of the most brilliant
intellects of his generation", was born in 1931 and specialized in
economics and politics during his time in Paris. In talent he was
rivaled by Hou Yuon, born in 1930, who was described as being "of truly
astounding physical and intellectual strength", and who studied
economics and law. Son Sen, born in 1930, studied education and
literature; Hu Nim, born in 1932, studied law.These men were perhaps the most educated leaders in the history of
Asian communism. Two of them, Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon, earned
doctorates from the University of Paris; Hu Nim obtained his degree from the University of Phnom Penh
in 1965. In retrospect, it seems enigmatic that these talented members
of the elite, sent to France on government scholarships, could launch
the bloodiest and most radical revolution in modern Asian history. Most
came from landowner or civil servant families. Pol Pot and Hou Yuon may
have been related to the royal family. An older sister of Pol Pot had
been a concubine at the court of King Monivong.
Three of the Paris group forged a bond that survived years of
revolutionary struggle and intraparty strife, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary
married Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith
(also known as Ieng Thirith), purportedly relatives of Khieu Samphan.
These two well-educated women also played a central role in the regime
of Democratic Kampuchea.The intellectual ferment of Paris must have been a dizzying
experience for young Khmers fresh from Phnom Penh or the provinces. A
number sought refuge in the dogma of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. At some time between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party, the most tightly disciplined and Stalinist of Western Europe's communist movements. The party was also very anti-intellectual. In 1951 the two men went to East Berlin
to participate in a youth festival. This experience is considered to
have been a turning point in their ideological development. Meeting with
Khmers who were fighting with the Viet Minh (and whom they subsequently
judged to be too subservient to the Vietnamese), they became convinced
that only a tightly disciplined party organization and a readiness for
armed struggle could achieve revolution. They transformed the Khmer Students' Association
(KSA), to which most of the 200 or so Khmer students in Paris belonged,
into an organization for nationalist and leftist ideas. Inside the KSA
and its successor organizations was a secret organization known as the
Cercle Marxiste. The organization was composed of cells of three to six
members with most members knowing nothing about the overall structure of
the organization. In 1952 Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary, and other
leftists gained notoriety by sending an open letter to Sihanouk calling
him the "strangler of infant democracy." A year later, the French
authorities closed down the KSA. In 1956, however, Hou Yuon and Khieu
Samphan helped to establish a new group, the Khmer Students' Union. Inside, the group was still run by the Cercle Marxiste.The doctoral dissertations written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan
express basic themes that were later to become the cornerstones of the
policy adopted by Democratic Kampuchea. The central role of the peasants
in national development was espoused by Hou Yuon in his 1955 thesis, The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for Modernization,
which challenged the conventional view that urbanization and
industrialization are necessary precursors of development. The major
argument in Khieu Samphan's 1959 thesis, Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development,
was that the country had to become self-reliant and had to end its
economic dependency on the developed world. In its general contours,
Khieu's work reflected the influence of a branch of the "dependency theory" school, which blamed lack of development in the Third World on the economic domination of the industrialized nations.

The KPRP Second Congress

After returning to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot threw himself into party
work. At first he went to join with forces allied to the Viet Minh
operating in the rural areas of Kampong Cham Province
(Kompong Cham). After the end of the war, he moved to Phnom Penh under
Tou Samouth's "urban committee" were he became an important point of
contact between above-ground parties of the left and the underground
secret communist movement. His comrades, Ieng Sary and Hou Yuon, became
teachers at a new private high school, the Lycée Kambuboth, which Hou
Yuon helped to establish. Khieu Samphan returned from Paris in 1959,
taught as a member of the law faculty of the University of Phnom Penh,
and started a left-wing, French-language publication, L'Observateur.
The paper soon acquired a reputation in Phnom Penh's small academic
circle. The following year, the government closed the paper, and
Sihanouk's police publicly humiliated Khieu by beating, undressing and
photographing him in public—as Shawcross notes, "not the sort of
humiliation that men forgive or forget." Yet the experience did not
prevent Khieu from advocating cooperation with Sihanouk in order to
promote a united front against United States activities in South
Vietnam. As mentioned, Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim were forced
to "work through the system" by joining the Sangkum and by accepting
posts in the prince's government.In late September, 1960, twenty-one leaders of the KPRP held a secret
congress in a vacant room of the Phnom Penh railroad station. This
pivotal event remains shrouded in mystery because its outcome has become
an object of contention (and considerable historical rewriting) between
pro-Vietnamese and anti-Vietnamese Khmer communist factions. The
question of cooperation with, or resistance to, Sihanouk was thoroughly
discussed. Tou Samouth, who advocated a policy of cooperation, was
elected general secretary of the KPRP that was renamed the Workers' Party of Kampuchea (WPK). His ally, Nuon Chea
(also known as Long Reth), became deputy general secretary; however,
Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were named to the Political Bureau to occupy the
third and the fifth highest positions in the renamed party's hierarchy.
The name change is significant. By calling itself a workers' party, the
Cambodian movement claimed equal status with the Vietnam Workers' Party. The pro-Vietnamese regime of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) implied in the 1980s that the September 1960 meeting was nothing more than the second congress of the KPRP.On July 20, 1962, Tou Samouth was murdered by the Cambodian
government. In February 1963, at the WPK's second congress, Pol Pot was
chosen to succeed Tou Samouth as the party's general secretary. Tou's
allies, Nuon Chea and Keo Meas, were removed from the Central Committee and replaced by Son Sen and Vorn Vet.
From then on, Pol Pot and loyal comrades from his Paris student days
controlled the party center, edging out older veterans whom they
considered excessively pro-Vietnamese.In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the central committee left Phnom Penh to establish an insurgent base in Rotanokiri
(Ratanakiri) Province in the northeast. Pol Pot had shortly before been
put on a list of thirty four leftists who were summoned by Sihanouk to
join the government and sign statements saying Sihanouk was the only
possible leader for the country. Pol Pot and Chou Chet were the only
people on the list who escaped. All the others agreed to cooperate with
the government and were afterward under 24 watch by the police.The region Pol Pot and the others moved to inhabited by tribal minorities, the Khmer Loeu,
whose rough treatment (including resettlement and forced assimilation)
at the hands of the central government made them willing recruits for a
guerrilla struggle. In 1965 Pol Pot made a visit of several months
duration to North Vietnam and China. He probably received some training
in China, which must have enhanced his prestige when he returned to the
WPK's liberated areas. Despite friendly relations between Sihanouk and
the Chinese, the latter kept Pol Pot's visit a secret from Sihanouk. In
September 1966, the party changed its name in secret to the Kampuchean
(or Khmer) Communist Party (KCP). The change in the name of the party
was a closely guarded secret. Lower ranking members of the party and
even the Vietnamese were not told of it and neither was the membership
until many years later.